Danehy

All along, the prognosticators have been wrong: Meet George W. Bush, the new Teflon president

The election is Tuesday, which is fine with me, because I'm pretty much poli-ticked off. I'm resigned to the inevitable (the re-election of the worst president of my lifetime), so we might as well get it over with.

It's not that I'm not used to being on the losing side in politics. The first time I ever was able to vote, I was one of 14 or so people in the United States to cast my ballot for George McGovern. After that, it was, among others, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and Walter Mondale. I sometimes think that the only reason I bother to put the paper in the box after punching the holes in it is to make sure that the judge in Superior Court No. 23 is retained.

I actually had relatively high hopes this time.

A couple years back, they (being the highly paid purveyors of political wisdom) said that if the stock market was still struggling come election time, Bush would be in deep trouble.

Well, the stock market is a full 20 percent lower than it was when Bush took office and below the "magic" number of 10,000, but now They say that it's really no big deal and, besides, it's not Bush's fault. After all, Sept. 11 happened.

You'll pardon my apparent callousness, but I don't understand how Sept. 11 had such a profound and lasting impact on our economy. Sure, it was shocking and unprecedented, and it dealt a blow to our national psyche. But we have the biggest, baddest, most robust and diverse economy in the history of the world. I sincerely think that the economic effects should've lasted until around Nov. 11 of that year, at which time the pissed-off American rebound should have taken effect.

Exactly how long into this next term are the American people going to continue to let Bush use Sept. 11 as an excuse for his tax cut-riddled shitty economy, not to mention his foolhardy foreign policy?

I'd like to state right now that if I happen to be killed by an al-Qaeda terrorist, don't let Bush use my death as an excuse to invade Uruguay. Or the Seychelles. Or any other place that might have pissed his Daddy off back in the day.

They said that if the war in Iraq was going badly at election time, Bush would be in trouble.

Despite what Dick Cheney--who continues to earn his first name on a daily basis--and Ann Coulter--who puts the "ho" in "horrible dresser"--say, the war in Iraq is a disaster. Our military leaders say that it's going badly; politicians on both sides of the aisle say it's a complete mess, and civilians and soldiers returning from Iraq describe it as a country in chaos.

They said that if no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, Bush would be completely discredited and dishonored and perhaps could even be impeached for taking us into a war under false pretenses.

Well, there are no weapons. There were no weapons at the time. In fact, approximately 10 percent of all living Americans hadn't even been BORN yet the last time there were such weapons in Iraq. But now Bush says that it doesn't really matter if there were such weapons, because he still feels really macho for having done what he did.

They said that if Bush and his rabid gaggle of butt-munchers continued to try to link al-Qaeda with Saddam Hussein, it would destroy what little credibility his administration had left.

Bush continued to do it until he was presented with incontrovertible evidence to the contrary and then, to his credit, he publicly admitted that no such link had ever existed. But a funny thing happened: He found that even after telling the truth, a vast percentage of Americans still believed the lie. Ann Coulter repeated it at the UA just last week, and the morons in attendance cheered, even though they have to know in their hearts-the-size-of-cranberries that it's a lie. Dick Cheney found that he could lie about the link on even-numbered days and then, on odd-numbered days, deny that he had lied, and the average American dolt, addled from watching reality TV and talking on cell phones, didn't have enough attention span to connect the dots.

They said that the loss of jobs would hurt Bush.

We've lost millions of jobs, and Bush goes on TV and crows about gaining tens of thousands of them back, and people applaud. The economy plummeted to appalling depths, and he goes on TV and says that the economy is growing at the fastest rate in 20 years. Sure, if--under Bill Clinton--the economy went from a 20 to a 21, that's only a 5 percent growth rate. But if--under Bush--it drops to an eight and then eventually builds back to a nine, that's a 13-percent growth rate. It's a bigger number, but we're not better off.

Now, because the average American has been whipped into a frenzy of fear over the specter of an unseen Boogie Man, They say that Bush is going to win.

Is it asking too much that their streak continue through one more prognostication?